Civil-Military Relations: the Role of Military Leaders in Strategy Making William E

STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP Civil-Military Relations: The Role of Military Leaders in Strategy Making William E. Rapp ABSTRACT: This article addresses the current inadequacies of the civil-military relations model advanced by Samuel Huntington and embraced by the US military, the tensions and realities of security policy development, and the professional responsibilities military leaders have for providing the best military advice possible to political leaders. ational security strategy making is difficult business. Some contend the entire enterprise, at its very best, is just focused Nimprovisation.1 Post-9/11 decisions to use military force, as part of national security policy implementation, and the execution of those polices, have been plagued in the past by a host of factors that have reduced public confidence in both government decision making and the efficacy of military force in the 21st century. With some clear exceptions, the senior leadership of the military, and those who advise it, have con- tributed to the confusion because of their largely self-imposed mindset of civil-military relations stemming from our almost 50-year acceptance of the orderly and appealing concepts of Samuel Huntington.2 Huntington’s 1957 The Soldier and the State, has defined civil-military relations for generations of military professionals. Soldiers have been raised on Huntingtonian logic and the separation of spheres of influ- ence since their time as junior lieutenants. His construct assigns to both military and civilian leaders clear jurisdictions over the employment of military force. This clarity appeals to military minds and forms the philosophical basis for military doctrine and planning systems. The logic of Huntington’s “objective control” of the military focuses on the role of civilian leaders to determine objectives and broad policy guidance up front. The military offers options to achieve these goals and provides its assessment of risk for each of these options. The president makes the key decisions and then the military executes this guidance with minimal Major General William political oversight or “meddling” and is held accountable for the results. E. Rapp is the 50th Commandant of the US However appealing to the military, Huntington’s conceptualization Army War College. A graduate of the United of proper civil-military relations does not reflect the reality of security States Military Academy strategy making and implementation today. Such an orderly, logical in 1984, his education world simply does not exist at the top of the national-security hierarchy. includes a Masters in National Security Policy and a Masters and PhD 1 Eliot Cohen, Robert E. Osgood Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced in Political Science from International Studies, conversation with author, October 20, 2015. See also Hew Strachan, The Stanford University. Direction of War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 243. 2 Samuel Huntington, The Soldier and the State (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1957). 14 Parameters 45(3) Autumn 2015 The result is that many senior military leaders find themselves, when thrust into this stratosphere, ill-served by the tradition the military’s embrace of Huntington has taught them. They worry that diving into the murky waters of national security decision-making causes them to become “political,” which is seen as antithetical to military culture and ethics. Since America puts so much faith in its military leaders and these national security decisions put American lives at risk, military officers are morally obligated to help craft the best possible policies and strategies.3 As opinion polls show and commentators assert, the American public holds the US military in extremely high regard and gives signifi- cant deference to military leaders on matters of security. This deference creates a responsibility, even an obligation, for generals to participate fully in the dialogue that leads to civilian decisions on the use of force.4 Our senior general officers, pressed into this dialogue by the demands of their current positions, know this obligation well. Although their war- fighting skills are unquestioned, most military leaders do not naturally wade, by inclination or assignment, into these political waters on their way up in rank. To be effective and to assist the president in crafting and implementing national-security policy involving military force, senior military leaders must embrace a more involved role in the back- and-forth dialogue necessary to build effective policies and workable strategies. Thus, educating and developing strategic-mindedness in our rising senior military officers is an imperative that trumps nearly all other aspects of their professional competence. Building and implementing successful national security policy and strategy is hard. It is even harder when senior military leaders communi- cate ineffectively. It is not as simple as Huntingtonian tradition suggests. Effective support to civilian decision-makers requires that military officers not only provide informed arguments about military strategies and capabilities, but also that they engage in a messy give-and-take on the full range of issues to craft living, whole-of-government strategies. Difficulties in Making and Implementing National Security Strategy Even in the simplest of cases, crafting and implementing a workable strategy to achieve national-security policy goals is a very difficult undertaking.5 Four main reasons account for this difficulty. First, the demanding workload, limits of experience, and tyranny of the present denies top decision makers and their staffs the luxury of having suf- ficient time to think through all the problems they face. Enumerating goals is relatively easy to do, but all too often strategic discourse ends there. Having the capacity, time, energy, and knowledge to craft a suf- ficiently detailed set of workable strategies to achieve policy goals is a much more elusive and difficult endeavor. These need to be strategies 3 James M. Dubik, “Civilian, Military Both Morally Obligated to Make War Work,” Army Magazine 65, no. 11 (November 2015): 17-18. LTG (Ret) Dubik’s upcoming book is focused on this moral obligation to get war-making decisions right. 4 Rachel Maddow makes this point effectively in Rachel Maddow, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (New York: Random House, 2012). 5 Richard Betts provides a thorough dialectic on the difficulty of strategy making and implementation in Richard Betts, American Force (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 232-271. STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP Rapp 15 that not only contain initial ends, ways, and means, but also things like development of supporting objectives and thorough risk analyses. All of that takes time and each day brings unforeseen challenges that strip away the time and energy leaders and their staffs have, especially in Washington. This limitation leads to the second challenge—the need to craft the fundamental underpinnings underlying any successful strategy. Assumptions, necessary for any planning to proceed, must be valid. Understanding the other actors is especially problematic; assumptions about how our adversaries and potential partners will act or react to our actions are often wrong. The ends sought must be attainable by the means available and given the ways with which those resources, includ- ing time, will be employed. Finally, and most importantly, the causal logic must be right. While causal relations—the “theory of victory” that logically ties actions to successful attainment of goals—are somewhat predictable in the short run, the omnipresence of chance and the exis- tence of thinking adversaries confounds predictions of causality over the longer term.6 If the theory of victory tends to dissolve over time due to the nonlinear nature of warfare, then the ability and willingness to change strategies becomes the third challenge to achieving effective security policy outcomes.7 Thus, one must view policy and strategy formulation as iterative. Policymakers and senior military leaders must adapt their strategies throughout implementation.8 They must change resources allotted, the methods of resource employment, or modify the ends themselves. But costs get sunk, administrations become tied to certain courses of action, and the “can-do” attitude ingrained in military leaders often leads to requests for more time and more resources rather than a thoughtful re-evaluation or modification of ongoing policy and strategy. Similarly, accurate assessments of changing situations are much harder to build than outside observers might expect. National level analysts often claim those on the ground are not able to see the forest for the trees. Those on the ground decry the rosiness or direness of external assessments as being out of touch with reality and missing the “fingertip sense” of actual conditions. Thus, due to the difficulty in both assessing the need for change and the very human reluctance to change our minds, policies and their implementing strategies often outlive their usefulness. Even if leaders have the capacity to develop a workable strategy, get the logic right, and possess the courage and wisdom to shift direction as required by changing situations, implementation of those strategies may confound even the most wise and diligent of senior leaders. Fog and friction abound in the field, making the execution of even the simplest strategic effort difficult, per Clausewitz’s famous dictum.9 In

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